’Tis the Season for Scrabble

There’s no better time than the rainy spring season to bring friends and family together for a game night. If you happen to find yourself at a table full of ruthless Scrabble players, you might find your new best friend in Wolfram|Alpha.

The Scrabble functionality in Wolfram|Alpha has useful tools, such as a points calculator and a dictionary word verifier. Wolfram|Alpha can also suggest other possible words to be used. Currently, Wolfram|Alpha supports the American English, International English, and French versions of Scrabble. Each of these versions has their own scoring system. Wolfram|Alpha’s GeoIP capabilities will return results based on the default version for the user’s location. However, you can specify a version in your input, like “International English Scrabble umbrella”.

Here are a few examples:

You can find the results for words such as umbrella by entering “Scrabble umbrella” into Wolfram|Alpha:

The results pods tells us that the score is 12 and that this word is in the regional Scrabble dictionary (American in this case). It also gives other words that can be made with these letters, listed in score order.

But what if your first “L” rests on a double letter score? Simply add “*2” after the double-scored letter:

You can also tell the score calculator that you are using a blank tile. To do so, add a “?” in place of the blank tile. Try “Scrabble Thun?er”:

You may have no idea what word to play, given a set of tiles. Here’s where the “Possible words” pod comes in handy. Let’s try an uncommon grouping of letters such as “Scrabble asdfghj”:

Feel free to share this functionality in Wolfram|Alpha with your fellow players and incorporate it as community tools. But if this is one trick you’d like to keep up your sleeve, learn how fast and easy it is to access the Scrabble functionality through your Wolfram|Alpha App for iPhone and iPod touch.

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Hmm… on the other hand, if I do the Thun?er example and I leave the blank till the end, [Scrabble ehnrtu?], Alpha assumes that I’m asking a question and punctuating it, rather than using seven tiles including a blank.

Unfortunately I think that this might be way over the heads of the average scrabble player. Fantastic (but not surprising) that wolfram alpha can handle it, but I can’t see my granny using it. She’d probably stick to a more standard Scrabble finder.